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August 2017

08/02/2017

From time to time I publish a guest post and believe this one will be of interest to young adults and Millennials entering the workforce, especially in the technology field. The piece was provided by Robert Lovell of PayScale.

PayScale, the online compensation and benefits analysts, recently carried out a study into levels of reported job satisfaction for employees at 17 of the world’s leading tech companies.

As part of the research project, feedback to survey questions gathered from nearly 35,000 staff – representing such global giants as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Hewlett Packard and IBM – was compiled into a series of infographics. The resulting charted data is shown below.

Overall, it appears to show that tech employees are typically relatively satisfied (and relatively well paid) at both early and mid-career stages. However, there also seems to be a fairly linear decline in reported levels of overall job satisfaction at those companies whose workforces tend to be older and more experienced on average.

The question is, does this constitute further evidence of the alleged youth bias that has dogged the tech industry in recent years? As ever with these sorts of studies, apparent emerging trends can be interpreted in numerous ways: it could equally be suggested, for example, that the results merely reflect the inherent optimism of recent recruits to any industry, as compared with their more seasoned colleagues.

Either way, with today’s graduates increasingly jostling to take up positions with these sorts of firms worldwide, it’s certainly an issue worthy of further discussion. For more information on exactly how the data was gathered and compiled – and, of course, what it might all mean – you can view the full details of Payscale’s sampling process in the published methodology here.